Chapter 8 - THE FOURTH LINEI held the VHS cassette up to the dim overhead bulb, squinting at the inner plastic rim where the dark blue casing met the mechanical spool.
Scratched deeply into the plastic—not written with ink, but carved with the tip of a knife—was a fourth line.
It wasn't written in Alessandra's neat handwriting. It was messier, frantic, carved years later.
LUCA IS NEXT.
The cold realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.
"Agent Vance," I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
Elena, who was supervising the collection of evidence by the forensics team, turned around. "Yes, Mr. Moretti? Did you find something else?"
I handed her the cassette, pointing silently to the carved warning on the rim.
Elena’s professional composure vanished instantly. Her eyes scanned the letters, and her face went completely pale. She immediately reached for her radio.
"Command, this is Vance. Status check on the perimeter. Did all transport vehicles leave the estate?"
A burst of static crackled from the handheld radio, followed by a voice that made my blood run cold.
"Vance, this is Unit 3. We're at the front gates. Half our team is tied up securing the suspects... wait. What the hell? The main estate power grid just shut down completely—"
Before the officer on the radio could finish his sentence, the single flickering bulb above our heads in the archive violently exploded.
Pop!
Pitch-black darkness swallowed the room.
"Get down!" Elena shouted, drawing her service weapon in the dark.
A split second later, the sharp, deafening crack of a gunshot echoed through the narrow stone corridor outside the archive.
Someone was still in the house. Someone who wasn't in handcuffs.
"The back utility tunnel!" Elena grabbed my arm in the dark, pulling me hard toward the far corner of the archive behind the towering steel shelving units. "Victor and Thomas didn't build this financial network alone. There's a silent partner on the board—someone with absolute access to the estate's security override codes!"
"Who?" I asked, ducking as another bullet punched clean through the wooden door of the archive, sending splinters raining down over our heads.
"Someone who sat at your dinner table tonight," Elena hissed, pulling a tactical flashlight from her belt and clicking it on. The beam cut through the swirling dust.
She pointed the light toward a hidden service hatch set low into the stone floor—a hatch I had never known existed in all the years I had lived in this ancestral home.
"Move!" Elena shoved the hatch open, revealing a steep, pitch-black metal ladder leading down into the subterranean drainage network beneath the estate.
May you like
We scrambled down the ladder just as heavy combat boots stomped into the archive above us.
"Search every corner!" shouted an unfamiliar, deep voice from the dark room we had just fled. "Find the tape! And kill anyone who has it!"
